Research and Teaching Interests

I joined the School of English at Trinity College Dublin in 2018. Before, I held assistant professorships at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder (2008-2009), the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich (2009-2012) and the Free University, Berlin (2012-2017), as well as visiting scholar positions at New York University (2003-2004) and Harvard University (2016). From 2013-2017, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the DFG (German Research Foundation) Research Group “The Role of Nature in Conceptualising Political Order: Ancient ‒ Medieval ‒ Early Modern” at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich.

My research focuses on the poetics of law and literature. My first book, Shakespeare’s Curse: The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama (2009/2014) analyses the uses of the ritual curse in Shakespeare’s history plays. Presently, I am preparing my second book “All Things with Double Terror”: Nature as First and Last Judgment in John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, for publication; it analyses Milton’s refashioning of a common metaphor, namely the identification of nature with an all-encompassing court of law and the associated process of judgment.

My teaching and research primarily engages with early modern authors, but also with writers from other periods, especially Wordsworth and Joyce. I am interested in the intersections of literary theory with legal theory and with philosophy, particularly in the work of Walter Benjamin, Hans Blumenberg, Gilles Deleuze and William Empson. I have edited volumes on the theatrum mundi metaphor (2013/2014) and on the relationship between horror literature and philosophy (2014). My current research project focuses on legal hybrids in early modern English literature.

I welcome inquiries from interested students at the postgraduate level in the fields of early modern literature (especially Shakespeare and Milton), law and literature, and literature and philosophy.

Recent Publications

Books

Shakespeare’s Curse:The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama, trans. Michael Winkler and Björn Quiring (London and New York: Routledge, 2014).

“‘Look on the Tragic Loading of this Bed’: Performing Community and its Other in Shakespeare’s Othello”, in “If Then the World a Theatre Present…”: Revisions of the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor in Early Modern England, ed. Björn Quiring (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2014).

“Introduction”, in “If Then the World a Theatre Present…”: Revisions of the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor in Early Modern England, ed. Björn Quiring (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2014).

“‘The Greatest Share of Endless Pain’: The Spectral Sacramentality of Pain in Milton’s Paradise Lost”, in Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture, ed. Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis, (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013).

“Unlesbarkeit (Poes The Man of the Crowd) [Unreadability (Poe’s The Man of the Crowd)]”, in Denkfiguren. Für Anselm Haverkamp/Figures of Thought. For Anselm Haverkamp, ed. Eva Horn and Michèle Lowrie (Berlin: August Verlag, 2013).

“‘A Fiction That We Must Inhabit’: Sense Production in Urban Spaces According to Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell”, in Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence, ed. Jörn Ahrens and Arno Meteling (London and New York: Continuum 2010).